Space Efficient Elephant Flow Detection

Ran Ben-Basat, Gil Einziger, Roy Friedman

Abstract: Identifying the large flows in terms of byte volume, known as elephant flows, is a fundamental capability that many network algorithms require. While optimal solutions that find the largest flows in terms of packet-count are known [5], constant update time algorithms for byte-volume were only recently discovered [1, 2]. Here, we propose an improved variant of the DIMSUM algorithm [2] that reduces the space requirement by 50% while allowing O(1) update time.